This round-up highlights some of the top investigative stories produced in Spanish by Latin American media outlets in 2020. Deep-dive investigations into important but often overlooked topics: stories about femicides in Mexico, COVID-19’s impact in the Amazon, and Latin America’s untold migrant chronicles.
InSight Crime is a hybrid organization, “part media, part think tank and part academic research institution,” as the founders describe it. Its focus is organized crime that runs through much of the Americas.
Between July and August this series of Quinto Elemento Lab, “Migrar bajo las reglas del COVID”, managed to answer a piece of the puzzle: what was happening with the migrants?
ProPublica and its media allies in Latin America and the U.S. have asked the public to submit information about detained immigrants through online forms that feed a database shared with participating media.
Journalist Thiago Antunes was working in the newsroom of newspaper O Dia on Nov. 28, 2015 when news broke at dawn: 111 shots from rifles and pistols were fired by the military police at five youths in the Lagartixa favela in Costa Barros, a poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro’s northern zone.
At least twenty journalists were killed in a plane crash late in the night of Nov. 28 near Medellín, Colombia. The group was accompanying a delegation from the Brazilian soccer team Chapecoense. The team, from the city of Chapecó in southern Brazil, was traveling to play its first match of the final of the South American Cup.
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas published a special essay by Brazilian editor Ricardo Gandour that looks at the effects of digital fragmentation on news production and consumption.
The Huffington Post launched its second venture in Latin America on Sept. 1 with the addition of Huffington Post México in Spanish.
A recent study by the European Broadcasting Union found that “well-funded and strong public service media goes hand in hand with signs of a healthy democracy.” Historically, funding challenges and scarce resources have plagued public media in Latin America.
“It always reminds us that it is not sleeping,” said María Martin, a veteran radio journalist honored on Nov. 19 at the University of Texas at Austin for her forty years in public radio and many years of work in Latin America to train journalists.